Do you know what an average person hears when faced with two techies discussing computer repairs? Gibberish, mostly. The typical computer user is not too familiar with the parts in a computer, just like the typical driver is not too familiar with the parts in their car. Can you relate with that feeling?

Sure, maybe you’ve heard of a GPU and RAM memory, but do you realize exactly what they’re for? Do you understand whether a part can be swapped easily or if the computer will still work without it? Can you tell when the tech repair guy is trying to fool you?

If you’re struggling to get up to speed on the basic computer parts and what they’re for, this article will be useful – it’s written 100% in real world language, in terms that anyone can understand.

Computer Box or Case

Used mostly when talking about desktop computers, this term applies to the actual box where all the internal components fit. A computer box includes a power supply unit, and usually features a sliding or removable panel for easy access to the parts inside.

Motherboard

This is the main circuit of most modern computers, designed to accommodate / connect with all the remaining parts listed below. As such, it’s one of the parts that’s more challenging to replace, and in many cases when it’s damaged – it’s often best to consider getting a new computer, since the repair of a motherboard can be expensive and the new one could be incompatible with the other parts you currently own.

CPU

The Central Processing Unit – this can be compared to the heart of your computer. It can be easily replaced and upgraded, although it’s not always cost efficient, since a top of the line processor can be pretty expensive on its own. Also, depending on how old your motherboard is, newer processors may not always be compatible.

In the past few years, CPU’s have evolved to include multiple cores – the latest generation has up to eight cores, which roughly equates to having eight processors running concurrently on the same chip.

GPU

The Graphics Processing Unit, or graphics card. This part will make a huge difference especially for users who play games or use graphic-intensive applications. It can be easily replaced, and (depending on the model) a dedicated graphics card can be reasonably inexpensive and inter-compatible with the other existing parts. Often, upgrading to a more powerful graphics card can breathe new power to an aging computer.

Most computers these days feature an integrated graphics card in the motherboard which allows minimal operations, so that if the dedicated GPU card fails, the computer will still turn on and boot up (although with limited graphic capabilities).

RAM Memory

Many people confuse the RAM memory with the Hard Drive, but they are very different components. You can think of the RAM as the surface of your office desk, and the hard drive as the filing cabinets in your office.

Getting a bigger office desk will help you get more things done at once and stay better organized, but you can only go so far in terms of expanding this component. Currently, the standard is 4 to 8 GB of RAM memory, with some people using up to 16GB. Any more than that becomes too expensive and is unnecessary for the common user. RAM memory comes in flat “sticks” that can be easily replaced by opening your computer box.

There’s a catch though: most computers only feature 3 or 4 RAM slots, so when looking to expand RAM memory you have to consider the compromise between available slots and capacity of your current sticks. Also, RAM comes in different speeds (it’s usually written on a sticker on the RAM stick), and for proper operation you want to make sure that all your RAM speed is the same.

Hard Drive

Following the reasoning above, the hard drive in your computer provides storage space – it’s where you keep all your documents and files. This part is also pretty easy to upgrade and replace and these days, hard drives are inexpensive (unless you’re looking for a top of the line SSD – solid state drive – this is the newer and much faster generation of hard drives).

You can install multiple hard drives in the same computer to get as much storage space as you need. If all the other components in your computer happen to fail for some reason, the hard drive is usually independent; meaning that you can often retrieve a hard drive from a broken computer, and all your data will be there when you connect the hard drive to another computer.

Partition

A single physical hard drive can be prepared (formatted) to become akin to multiple virtual hard drives – these are called partitions. Hard Drive partitions will be very much independent from one another, as though they were different disks altogether. This can be useful because you can format any partition on a hard drive without interfering with the others.

For example, it’s common to create partitions on bigger hard drives for practical reasons. Let’s imagine you have a 500GB hard drive; you may want to split that into a 100GB partition to install the Operating System, and a 400GB partition to store all your user data. Doing so, you can later reinstall your operating system without interfering with the files in your data partition.

Optical Drive

This is just another word for the DVD (or CD-ROM, or Blu-Ray) drive in your computer. These drives are inexpensive and provided you have available slots in your computer box, you can install multiple optical drives.

Peripherals

This is an umbrella term for all the accessories that you can connect to a computer, usually on the outside: including the mouse, keyboard, webcam, external hard drives and other parts. There are the easiest parts to replace and usually they’re the least expensive and most easily perishable during the computer’s life span.